Sunday, December 7, 2008

In the link above Diane blogs about a phone call she received from Jack Layton who was seeking her thoughts on the economic challenges of the day. Here is my comment for Diane:

Diane:

Did you inform Jack Layton that his BLIND SUPPORT of Harper's income trust tax has caused immense damage:

(1) to Canada's tax base, from the over $108 billion of trust related takeovers causing $1.4 billion a year in lost taxes?

(2) resulted in creating a two tiered pension system in Canada where the 25% with pensions get to own income trusts free of the 31.5% tax and the other 75 do not?

(3) favoured foreign investors to Canadians investors, by allowing foreign investors to strip all the earnings of Canadians companies out of the country via interest payments and tax sheltered earnings?

(4) introduced purely unnecessary debt to be imposed on Canadian businesses like BCE for no reason other than to dodge taxes and implement games of financial engineering....causing BCE to fire 2500 workers, destroy their credit rating, rendering the whole industry less cost competitive and resulting in higher costs to the consumer?

(5) put the NDP in bed with the life insurance companies like Manulife, who lobbied the Harper government to kill income trusts so they could sell more synthetic junk food investments like variable rate annuities, whose issuance does nothing to invest in the real economy and whose issuance and lack of hedging has now brought the house of Manulife into its current precarious financial position?

(6) permitted major tax legislation to be introduced without a scintilla of evidence for its underlying policy assumption that income trusts cause tax leakage. If the government wants to hold forth quantitative arguments then it damn well better be willing to prove them, apart from issuing 18 pages of blacked out documents?

(11) placed Canadian capital markets at a competitive disadvantage to the US, whose issuers and investors can issue/own income trust equivalents known as Master Limited Partnerships

Jack Layton needs to expose the lies coming out of the Department of Finance on which this policy was foisted onto Canadians by the likes of Mark Carney on behalf of his former clientele at Goldman Sachs. Its not too late for Jack Layton to look smart on this file and expose Stephen Harper's $35 billion fraud?

2 comments:

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EVENTS

Income Trust Halloween VigilThanks to all who participated in both the Ottawa and Calgary vigils to mark the anniversary of the announcement.

WE"D LIKE SOME ANSWERS

As you well know, the ‘income trust thing’ has grown beyond the
question of whether fair taxes are paid on income from trusts. It’s
become a giant dirty snowball, and as it rolls forward it accumulates
more and more bulk. There are so many unanswered questions. Let's list a few and invite our "Accountable" government and our free press to provide some much-needed answers.

It is said “Trusts are inefficient use of capital. Why?” Two
related questions are ‘Whose money is it, anyway?’, and ‘Do Canadian
investors have a free and efficient market?’

How can information that is already in the public domain at SEDAR
make for a state secret? How could such information be used to harm
the Canadian national interest? And who would cause the harm?

Why won’t the Canadian media investigate the falsehoods and
misrepresentations told by the Minister of Finance to a committee of
Parliament? Was the Minister in contempt of Parliament?

Why won’t the Canadian media report (a) government tax revenues
gained from BCE in 2006 when BCE was a corporation to (b) government
tax revenues that would be gained in 2007 from BCE, if BCE had been
allowed to proceed to a trust, and (c) government tax revenues that
will be gained in 2007 from BCE, when BCE ownership has been carved
up as 45% foreign ownership and 55% large Canadian pension fund
ownership?